RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

You guys remember Cynthia McKinney, right? Georgia’s resident political nutball (not peanuts–sorry, Jimmy Carter, but you’re plenty nutty yourself), Truther, and “Freedom” flotilla supporter who was so–well–nutty that the voters in Georgia’s 4th District voted her out for a guy who thinks Guam can tip over and capsize.*

Well, it turns out the raving anti-Semite crowd will probably get some new representation in Congress come 2013 from NY-10 with Charles Barron. Moe has already touched on this before, but I think it merits deeper digging beyond his atrocious comments about white people. The National Review has a nice article up from Thursday highlighting the situation. You see, Mr. Barron didn’t just rise up to “likely Democratic nominee” status in a vacuum–he’s had plenty of help. Let’s start with Edolphus Towns, the man retiring from the seat. Despite calling Barron a “bomb thrower” when the two faced off in the primary four years ago, Mr. Towns has apparently mellowed on the man enough to endorse him. But it’s not just him, from the National Review:

Barron has gained the backing of several important unions in New York City. District Council Locals 37 and 1707, along with their parent union, the American Federation of State, Country, and Municipal Employees, are supporting Barron’s candidacy, nominally because his primary opponent, Hakeem Jeffries, has endorsed charter schools.

So let’s get this straight, the local unions are so against school choice that they are willing to support a lunatic like Charles Barron. But the NR doesn’t stop there, they give us a nice biographical sketch of the man:

Barron had a varied career before this run for Congress. He was a Black Panther, the secretary general of the African Peoples Christian Organization, and a community activist. He failed to win races for the mayoralty of New York City in 2005 and the governorship of New York in 2010. But now, with Towns’s endorsement and union support, he is a credible candidate for the House of Representatives.

I’d like to say that the amount of facepalm this situation induces is such that not even the Hindu deity Shiva’s many arms would be sufficient, but I can’t honestly say I’d expect much different from a D+22 district. But I’ve called him an anti-Semite, so just how anti-Semitic is he, Johnny? Behold:

Barron has a long history of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic rhetoric. He joined the Gaza flotilla in May 2010 and fulminated against Israel afterward at a rally on the steps of New York’s city hall, saying, “You want to stop terrorism? The biggest terrorist in the world is the government of Israel.” He has also described Gaza as a “death camp” where Israel imposes “the same kind of conditions [as] the Nazis.” And in 2010 he even denied Israel’s right to exist: “You want to discuss Israel becoming a state in 1948 when it should not have?”

Following the Crown Heights riots, in which a Jewish doctoral student, Yankel Rosenbaum, was brutally murdered by a mob, Barron said of the Jewish community in Brooklyn, “They only make up 20 percent of the population, but they’ve always walked these streets as if they owned them, and acted as if they were the only ones that mattered.”

It’s pretty boilerplate stuff as far as anti-Semitism goes, but that doesn’t make it any less atrocious. The objectionable stuff doesn’t stop there, either. He fully buys into the whole Occupy Wall Street mentality, having spoken at one of the protests. And, as Moe noted, he’s apparently a fan of Muammar Gadhafi. No, no, I’m serious. He once said, “[Americans], they don’t know that Qaddafi was our brother. People say ‘Didn’t he kill all those people?’ I say, ‘I don’t know anything. The man was a freedom fighter.’”

You know, as I’ve noted before, this is a D+22 district, so it’s not like the Republican candidate will be anything other than nominal opposition. However, that doesn’t stop me from employing what I call the “Moe Lane rule” and enjoying some schadenfreude at the Democratic Party making a fool out of itself in the same city that, as recently as September of last year, sent a message in NY-09 that the President’s tone on Israel was unacceptable. Seriously, Blue-on-Blue stupidity is fun to watch, but even so, giving this man a national platform from which to spread his filth says a rather sad thing about our national political discourse. This is the sort of thing that could have been expected some 50 or 100 years ago. Not in 2012, but these are Democrats. Do you honestly expect any different?